Accessibility Links

Film: Son of Saul

Kevin Maher

April 29 2016, 1:01am, The Times

Géza Röhrig, left, as Saul Ausländer, a Hungarian Jew forced to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau

★★★★★“Immersive” is not the word you want to use to describe a Holocaust drama. It seems too flippant and is too often applied to the whizzbangery of Hollywood 3D blockbusters that sell you fantastical dreams of utopian otherworlds.

Yet it is the most fitting description of László Nemes’s harrowing and hugely upsetting Oscar winner, Son of Saul, a film that plunges you, shoulder height, into the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau during the final days of the war. The camera clings (terrified perhaps?) to the side of Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig, stunning), a Hungarian Jew working in one of the camp’s many Sonderkommando units. These are teams of specially selected prisoners burdened with the job of guiding fellow Jews to the gas chambers, cleaning up after mass…

Want to read more?

Subscribe now and get unlimited digital access on web and our smartphone and tablet apps, free for your first month.